You can count me out but good luck to you
New Studio Arsians with a focus on alpha passthrough and interactivity
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Hi everyone, after some issues with getting registered I have uploaded the first scene today and hope some of you can provide some feedback.
This was the first usable alpha passthrough video we have shot. Since then we have learned a lot, but I still think it has some special things that you havent seen in any video yet.
This video is in 5.7k, we have since upgraded the camera to deliver 8k60 content and redid the scenes, but we want to release the three prototype scenes we rendered first since they were a lot of work. This 16 minute video took 30 hours to render on a 3080 and the last 20 minute video (Gael Sex Level 1, coming next monday) even rendered 40 hours.
I hope I will get some feedback for scale and behaviour. I am 1,75m and recorded this video lying down, so everyone with that body size should get a perfect match. I have checked the video while sitting on a couch and I get a perfect 1 to 1 size ratio. This means that in the first 30 seconds when Gael sits between my virtual legs her hands are positioned correctly on my real lap.
If you are under 1.65m or over 1.85m I would like to know if the scale still looks correct to you. Many of you said the last SLR Passthrough scene was great in scale, but to me the beautiful Era Queen was a giant in passthrough between 2,50m and 3m. I am talking Lady Dimitrescu size. I found it astonishing that no one complained about that.
The second thing I want some feedback about are keyed out hands. In the beginning I touched the girls sometimes, which results in a effect I call Ghost hands. Basically its my green suit covered hand on the girl and it is an effect I would like to use sometimes in special moments. My editior complained about it and in newer videos I stoppped touching the girls.
I am fully aware that it can look bad, but not touching the girl at all is very difficult, especially since I cannot talk because of immersion. Grabbing a girls hips to penetrate her harder so I get better moans vs letting her do everything and basically being a motionless puppet is a balance performer and audience should have a long chat about.
Are these Ghost hands a huge distraction for you or do you think it's ok to touch the girls as the male greenscreen performer? I already concluded that touching her feet etc. is bad for the performance and won't do it again.
But I am unsure about triggers that my partner needs to cum, like deep penetration hip pulling or nipple twisting. Would you be ok with this or no touching at all?
First scene is now online:
https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/gael-blowjob-level-118-thai-48495
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Will test out the scene later this week and comment further when I have time, but it's really neat to see the careful thinking from your production!
I love the potential found in AR, and having a series/arc with related or connected scenes is also really interesting.
Personally I don't like ghost hands. In order to not break immersion, I feel obliged to act along and mimic the male talent as 1:1 as possible. It becomes difficult if the motions are irregular and unpredictable. At that point I'm just groping thin air, which is also disappointing. Worst of all are double ghost hands while there's penis action - 3 required points of contact but only 2 hands, etc.
That said, if it's essential to get a good performance, then compromise is needed.
Perhaps single (non-dominant) ghost hand? Placement that minimizes occlusion from POV (e.g. touching from below)? Double ghost hands only during foreplay sequences? More steady/predictable hands so viewers can play along easier? Ghost hands in less distracting places (e.g. legs/feet during cowgirl, rather than pelvis/chest)?
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Excited for this! The Asian “bar girl” focused content on here typically has decent looking girls - shot horrifically - so seeing it shot with PT in mind and actually caring about framing and content is great to hear.
Regarding hands - a little is OK, too much is distracting, but if the ghost hands are covering her boobs / ass / feet - for me it’s bothersome.
As for audio direction - just give direction and then splice in a clip of previous sounds - no one will hardly notice
I favorited - but only briefly watched your recent one - will give it a proper watch. Honestly my biggest gripe with every blowjob channel on here is
a) not enough well framed (or at all) standing BJ
b) not enough standing / sitting facial finishes actually ON the girls face. Just dribble in her general direction.
c) chopping off half the girl’s body in a seated position. Make sure you can see the girls’ body! She may need to arch her back more, kick her feet out, do it from a side or 3/4 angle etc. it’s probably uncomfortable- but I’d rather admire her ass / tits / etc than just see a disembodied head bobbing up and down.
I’ll give more feedback if what I thought of your video later. Keep at it! Lucky dude!
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diwanga Excited for this! The Asian “bar girl” focused content on here typically has decent looking girls - shot horrifically - so seeing it shot with PT in mind and actually caring about framing and content is great to hear.
Regarding hands - a little is OK, too much is distracting, but if the ghost hands are covering her boobs / ass / feet - for me it’s bothersome.
I agree with sentiment that the Thai "bar gir" content is shot horrifically. VRinAsia or JohnTronVR, both are horribly shot with decent looking girls.
Also echoing the "ghost hands", i'm sure its good for the actors but for the viewer it messes with immersion.
One thing I think those channels do well is have a 1-5 min back story, of how you saw, met, got the girl and bring her back to your room. I think a short back story is important personally. I know its AR, so its probably going to be harder to do this. I think people can just skip the intro if need to get to the AR portion. Or within the AR have some convo setting the scene.
Seeing your video, the BJ scene is okay. Not commenting on the technical details.
With VR in general eye contact is key. so the video or the seat needs to be angled a little down so its easy for her to look at the camera.
Additionally she was a little to quiet, so a little bit of more "acting."
you haven't down cowgirl or other positions yet. For cowgirl I saw this image from a jav site and I think you will find it helpful. Focus the camera more on the ceiling and have the girl come forward.
Thank you for the feedback, let me clarify a few things.
There is no story because this scene is not supposed to be standalone. My plan was to have many small videos later connected in an interactive story, basically your typical hentai game but in live action. Currently I have no idea how to do that on SLR because any non sexual scenes would land in Sandbox,
I realize this is not the best first scene because the second girl is missing. Usually Amy is doing the talking because Gael doesn't speak English yet and she is doing the training. The next scene on Friday will have both girls at once, this will better explain where we are going story wise.
Regarding your picture, this would be impossible in passthrough. To get a body match with the audience the camera cannot be tilted at all, it must be straight forward. Also the camera cannot be positioned beside the head, it would also make body match impossible. But actually cowgirl and reverse cowgirl are the easy positions that work perfectly in passthrough, so if this is your favorite you'll get a lot of content. Today I started to experiment with Doggystyle and it was a complete fail. I will have to rebuild the whole green room and invent a new rig to shoot doggy, but it's my favorite position and sorely missing from the content I shot until now. This is planned for Level 2 scenes.
Luckily missionary is boring, because I don't have any idea how to shoot that content interesting in passthrough.
I see we have multiple votes against ghost hands, I will refrain from using it. The argument that it breaks immersion because you want to mirror act is the one that convinced me that it's a bad idea, thanks for the feedback.
unfortunately the image quality is, well, the worst I have ever seen on this site. I am sorry, I want to be supportive but I cannot watch it. It is grainy and pixelated and even if you had 10 of the hottest porn stars in the vid I wouldn't be able to watch it.
Arsians_com
Upload the original regular videos along with this passthrough stuff if this is the style you want to do. But that way people have a choice and you double your content.
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The image quality is not good, sadly - it's a learning curve I guess! Does the original footage look this poor? You may have rendered the proxy files by mistake or just used the wrong compression on export. And the right eye is really blurry, left eye less so. If the original footage looks like this then unless the camera was absolute garbage your mistake was not providing enough light for the little sensor to discern detail.
As for scale, it's a little on the small side for me (no biggy, except when the image quality is this low you can't zoom in on those half dozen pixels - your new 8k cam will give the user more freedom to tweak the image to their tastes). You are right that Era Queen looked too big, but scale can be reduced in post to an extent. Scale cannot be increased so easily because instead of compacting pixels you have to enlarge them, never a good thing. And your camera is a little too far away for me personally, just a teeny bit.
Where to place the camera will take some experimentation and will change depending on the rig. Remember, this is a camera not the human eye so you can't just put the camera where your head is and expect perfect real life experience. Every camera / lens combo has a different perspective, and you'll find your new Canon makes things look too big. Camera placement is always a compromise and you have to be flexible with the ultimate goal being the best experience for the viewer. You're worrying about the height of the viewer, as if that makes much difference - it really doesn't in most cases because you are dealing with torso length of viewer (eyes to cock) not full height. This link shows you the difference in average torso lengths for people of varying heights: https://hikemuch.com/average-torso-length/ - you may be surprised by how similar a short and tall viewer are in this respect. If the scene looks perfect to you in VR, you're fine.
One thing to note - passthrough is good but it's not perfect, and for me I perceive scaling and distance differently in passthrough and VR. Basically, Quest 3 passthrough is very slightly too "close" versus real life. It's a subtle difference but a scene can look fine in VR then not with passthrough enabled, and vice versa. If your focus is passthrough then I would aim for perfection in that, according to current (quest 3) standards.
Hands - ideally you should not use your hands at all in passthrough. In regular VR porn it's up for debate, some people are ok with it, some not. In passthrough it's not ok, especially if you're going to key out your hands! If you must touch the model for your own reasons, the hands have to be shown, as flesh colored human hands. Edit - I see you've addressed this and will not use hands in future - awesome Hopefully this means you also won't jerk yourself off to finish, which is my least favorite thing. Let the girl finish you off, even if you have to cut, pause the shoot to get yourself ready then cut to her finishing. Dudes wanking on screen is not what straight porn is about IMHO.
Camera handling. Either be more careful with handling the camera / rig / mics (like do not fucking touch them at all once you're rolling) or fix all that terrible handling noise in post. Audio is a big deal, and the loud banging every time the camera is knocked (and this is just a BJ scene!) is not pleasant.
Finally, you state above that the camera cannot be tilted at all. Yes, it can. You just have to keep the horizon level, but you can tilt up or down to best suit the scene. The camera is a proxy for the viewer's head and the angle of view should approximate a comfortable angle for the viewer.
Good luck!
Thank you for the feedback, you are absolutely right about the image and sound quality. This is the main reason I have never published any of the scenes I have shot until now. The Insta360 Evo used is a better VR Cam than most consumer models, but it just doesn't look good enough if you are used to modern 8k60. Good spot on the right camera smudge, it's in all scenes and no matter how much I tried to polish the lens it doesn't disappear, it was there from the beginning.
All these things will be fixed after the 3 prototype scenes. The first 8k60 video will still have bad sound,but we fixed this with an external mic. On the second video we have also switched out the lights, which was one of the main reasons to improve the quality. You just can't do any decent photography with not enough photons. ;-)
But since we switched out the lights the new R5 mark 2 camera melts within 10 minutes, which has ruined a few scenes already. It's an absolute joke since that was the main problem on all previously released Canon cameras and should've been solved with this new model. Officially it should be able to record 18 minutes before overheating, but I get less than 10.
Lots of issues come with the new camera, but the drastic rise in quality is worth a bit of suffering.
Now the no jerking on the cumshot request, this will be super hard to do and won't be in the level 1 videos that I've shot already (around 10 8k60 videos, planned to launch until mid November). I will try to implement that in the future, but it will be super hard with some girls.
Keep in mind that I am training absolute beginners who are still learning and Gael for example gives an absolute horrendous handjob. She never wanked anyone off before and just gave blowjobs, that's why she has zero feeling for how to do that.
But yeah, I totally understand this critique and will try to improve, thanks for posting. I really tried to create one shots to not cut the scenes and keep them natural, but since the Canon is constantly crashing a more edited style will be necessary anyway.
Now about the tilting of the camera let me explain why it shouldn't be done in passthrough.
You are "anchoring" the scene on the dick. In the first 30 seconds of the video you instinctively try to get the virtual dick as closely to your real one as possible.
If you tilt the camera upwards like suggested anyone who has the standard horizontal view will have his dick stuck out of their behind, which means it won't be visible at all and disorients the viewer. Without seeing any background to orient yourself you will not get a body match easily and spend minutes resetting the camera orientation with the Meta button.
So yes,you can tilt the camera and it's a popular way to film VR scenes, but for AR the camera must always be straight frontal until we get better tools like tracking with auto adjustments, otherwise the immersion gets replaced with settings fiddling.
It's not impossible, but highly impractical.
It could be done by guiding your head with arrows to a body match, I'll do some tests to see if that's viable.
Arsians_com Hey man, thanks for the in depth response. Glad my feedback was taken in good spirit.
I don't get what you mean about tilting not being possible in passthrough. PT and VR are exactly the same aside from one having the background removed (and subtle differences in scaling and perspective due to the nature of the tech). Film it the same! If you look at SLR's PT videos you'll see no huge difference in how they shoot except for PT is more demanding in terms of precision, hands, etc. Some positions work better in PT / VR but essentially it's the same concept.
I understand you don't want to confuse the viewer by having the action outside of the default view when looking straight ahead. In your BJ scene, you can have the model start by standing then dropping into position, so the viewer understands they should look down. I think everyone starts watching a scene looking straight ahead, so ideally the camera angle should mimic that - I look down from there to see my virtual cock.
This topic starts to get pretty complex honestly and we could go back and forth too much. All I will say is you don't need to overthink the "rules" of PT. We've got enough scenes out there that we kind of know what works and what doesn't, and tilting is definitely a thing which works fine for certain positions.
If you could film exactly like recent SLR passthrough examples that would be fine for most of us, I think! Obviously bring your own creative aspect but start by following the work that others have already done.
BTW I forgot to mention, you also have to watch your vertical alignment. Check the vertical levels of the left and right images and they are slightly off (left image is lower than the right).Even a small disparity can break the scene or at least give the viewer a headache. Something to quickly check in the edit.
I have been out of this forum for a few months but recently catching up and your post caught my attention.
I personally feel its great people like you are getting into this space and I would take any criticism of the quality of these first scenes lightly. You clearly said you shot with an Evo and its merely a "TEST" I dont understand why people keep bringing it up still.
Anyways, I'm more interested in the project as a whole and your progress to use a newer canon camera, quick question though, why didn't you just go for the R5C instead? Don't have any overheating issues, I personally shoot 8k for over an hour at a time and had no issues.
I am personally most interested in the fact you are working on a larger VR game and what that means for the scenes, I always look forward to new type of content, concepts, points of view and role playing. VR porn scenes are getting boring as heck these days, I still prefer Japanese scenes shot in 4k over most modern stuff. I hope that your work can get some different perspectives angles and ideas, along with such a beautiful new model you showed off, she looks great. Please feel free to share more pictures of her in the meantime, it can really get a lot of people excited about your content when you preview pictures of your talent, similar to what SLR does on the forum where they are constantly sharing images and previews of models and scenes.
Focus on the fundamentals, forget about image quality being the number one priority. If you can manage to nail down your angles, lighting, exposure, and performance you will have a good scene. I would much rather watch something truly compelling in a lower quality than junk boring scenes in 12k. Even SLR cant seem to figure out the fundamentals in PT yet so dont be discouraged by all the naysayers or people being nitpicky. One of their recent PT scenes https://www.sexlikereal.com/scenes/lias-edge-46153 just came out 2 months ago and it has the absolute worst scaling and lens focus I have ever seen and it was an absolute shame because it wasted that scene with Lia.
Just about the one-shot vs. cut aspect, I think VRedging has really mastered using cuts with an "eye blink" effect. Not literally 100% perfect, but so close that I always admire how well it's done. Of course, they produce with experienced female talent, which makes a difference.
Perhaps while shooting if you need to direct, retake, or even prepare the money shot, you could have a prepared/practiced "base pose" to return to (and then make the cut)? I find carefully done cuts preferable to one-shots where the girl looks off-camera for direction/feedback which tends to break immersion more.
Two common JAV cut poses are lean-in deep kissing (prompts eye closure), and lean-in behind the ear to say something naughty (face off-screen to load fake cum for a cum-in-mouth blowjob finish). These might not work for what you're doing, but just some thoughts!
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I strongly disagree with you saying 'forget about image quality being the number one priority'.
How can you even say that? If the image quality was fine and he was looking to make it super high def, then sure...But this is currently unviewable. You point out there being boring scenes at 12k, which is fair, image quality != good, I agree. But I can't see how anyone can view this and say that image quality is not the first and most important thing for him to fix. Image quality alone won't make a bad scene good, but extremely poor image quality will make any scene bad.
Thank you guys for the positive encouragement, I am thankful for every little bit of info that will make the videos better. A few pointers.
Image quality is of course supper important. But as I said I already spend nearly 20k$ in the last 60 days to improve that. The content you currently see is all shot with what I had before I invested, so huge upgrades in quality are coming. I just really want to still launch the lower quality content because it was a lot of work to shoot and render and I think even with the lower quality it is worth watching because there is so little passthrough content until now. I think there are currently 34 alpha passthrough videos, 32 from SLR and 1 from another studio and my first scene.
I bought the R5 mark 2 because I plan to travel a lot to different locations. This model should be able to shoot 8k60 in the body without external power.
It also apparently overheats less than the r5c and the r5, but we have way higher temperatures in south east Asia. I also have a lighting problem.
Originally I bought two studio lights , but they didn't evenly lit the scene enough, so now I use a 1000w grow light and bounce the light against the wall. This makes the scene evenly lit, but raises the room temperature. Without these lights I could shoot 15 min.
This needs improving, balancing heat and light will be am ongoing issue for now.
There is also a accessory for the camera that cools it for longer shots, but this battery grip is sold out everywhere, this should also help when we can get it
Just last week I found a cooling fan from Ulanzi that works with the camera and boosts its recording time for 20-30%
Until now I shot around 10 scenes with the R5 mark 2 and got better at using the camera, but it's so much more complicated to shoot with a cam like that compares to what I did before. I basically can't shoot alone , I need a stage hand to make sure lighs, external sound, rotation of the cam, light bleed and solid colors from the green room, shadows etc. are all managed on every shot.
Someone was asking for a holiday themed scene. I shot the girls in two catgirl outfits for a Halloween double anal scene, that scene will be released before other recently shot ones, so it should show the current improvements in camera and light.
I will check out VRedging to see if I can copy their blink transitions,thanks for the tip.
One thing I recently realized is that if I continue to erase the male actor completely ,then I will be able to throw hand gestures. But I haven't decided yet if the male body should always be erased. Lots of things to try like leaving an outline for positioning.
I'll add some pictures of the Halloween kitties as a teaser.
Arsians_com
Amy is hot! I liked her scene in AmyVR...
The image quality was not the best possible. I hope you find ways to improve it.
Anyway, I look forward to more VR scenes with her!
xeddin1 IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT, he clearly said its just a damn test, what cant you understand about that???? Therefore the image quality is of no concern regarding that DAMN scene, you baboons just focus on the resolution and ignore completely what he even said in the first place. He said he already got the canon system this was just an EARLY test with a camera, damn dude you cant read
Arsians_com good for you bro, keep grinding, anyone in this damn forum will always have something to nitpick about but 99% have never even held a VR system in their hands. I like the drive and the effort, its all up to you to continue to improve and refine. The only thing I can add is that you should strongly consider switching to the R5C just for the overheating issues, if not, thats ok, shoot segments at a time and give the camera and the crew a quick brake to cool off haha.